In the bad old days, before progress took over, and the EU forced us to jump through their absurd and utterly pointless and expensive recycling hoops, people used to keep a metal dustbin at a convenient spot near to their back door. The bin men came round once a week, collected the bin, emptied it and put it back more or less where they’d found it. Occasionally, they didn’t put the lid back on properly. From time to time a bin got dented. But what a brilliant service it was.

Now, thanks to the dictates of some unknown, unelected and brain dead eurocrat, we all spend a big chunk of our lives struggling to meet the ever-changing requirements of the recycling gestapo.

What surprises me is that there are clearly still many people who do not realise that our rubbish problems were created by the EU because it was the EU which created the laws which force councils to introduce bizarre rubbish collecting rules. Impractical eurocrats brought in laws forcing councils to obey daft recycling rules without bothering to work out what to do with all the recycling. And so once again the EU created expensive and damaging chaos.

I have the utmost contempt for the whole recycling business which has made life miserable for millions – for no good reason.

Recycling enthusiasts encourage us to wash out bottles and cartons. This wastes water – one of the most valuable resources on the planet. Millions of people around the world are dying of thirst while we are encouraged to waste water washing out jam pots and baked bean tins which will end up being tossed onto rubbish dumps in Poland or Vietnam.

Recycling enthusiasts relentlessly approve the production of endless numbers of plastic boxes and containers. The irony is that the recycling industry is now one of the biggest users of plastic on the planet.

Recycling enthusiasts tell us to put our waste food in boxes outside our homes. The inevitable result is that the number of rats in the country is increasing dramatically. And the rats are bigger, tougher and more dangerous than ever. Also, when we bring in our waste food boxes our hands are inevitably contaminated with other people’s bugs. The recycling industry is a major cause of serious infection.

The recycling nonsense was introduced by eurocrats in Brussels in order to take closer control over our lives. They forced local councils to take part by fining them millions if they did not take part in their mad schemes. Bizarrely, inexplicably, Britain has now signed up to the EU’s recycling targets for 2035 and Britain has signed up to obey the rules – even after we have left the EU.

Now councils have found ways to make money out of recycling. Last year seven million people in the UK were fined for putting their bins out at the wrong time. And in some parts of the country (notably Wales) people who do not sort their rubbish properly are fined.

But I bet your sanctimonious council didn’t bother to tell you that in the last six years the UK spent £900 million (and a good deal of energy) sending waste over to Europe where it was quietly burnt. Our recycling used to be sent, at great expense, to the Orient. But the Chinese decided they don’t want our rubbish. This is no great surprise because the vast majority of the plastic we throw out cannot be recycled, or is far too expensive to recycle, and so the Chinese couldn’t do anything much with it except burn it and the fees we were paying wasn’t enough for the inconvenience and the pollution. Naturally, no one bothered to work out how much energy was wasted in transporting our waste half way round the world.

So what happens now to your carefully sorted recycling material when you’ve finished washing it and sorting it and putting it out for the recycling lorry?

What do the sanctimonious recycling gestapo do with all those trays and sacks of sorted rubbish?

Well, my long term, trenchant criticism of the whole recycling nonsense has been justified by the recent discovery that British recycling, carefully washed and sorted and collected and transported is now being dumped in Poland where it is unloved, unwanted and a very expensive tribute to the stupidity of the whole recycling nonsense.

Councils everywhere send round their stupidly expensive recycling lorries and gullible citizens spend hours washing out their empty jam jars and yoghurt cartons and collecting all their bits of uneaten food and bunging them into little plastic waste caddies. It is all a waste of time.

Our recycling efforts are actually doing far more harm to the environment than if we just dumped our rubbish in unused coal mines.